Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Flannery O'Connor and Violent Grace

To Flannery O’Connor,
grace was a violent thing. Not a solemn walk down a church aisle or a hushed
prayer, but a bullet. A bull’s horn. A suicide.

You
won’t find her in Christian book stores, though you may have read one of her
stories in college. Her
goal in writing fiction was clear:

My audience is the
people who think God is dead. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the
almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

Her
characters are grotesque. Her religious voice is unconventional.

She’s kind of my hero.

Grace is shocking

When I first hand my
students an O’Connor story, their typical response is to cringe or ask
incredulously: What did I just read?

I understand this
reaction. It’s what good ‘ole Flannery would have wanted. Shock. But she wanted
that shock to lead to understanding. So before helping my students unpack the
story, I ask them a question:

What must come before
grace?

I ask because the
answer is what every Flannery O’Connor story is about: the moment when a
character realizes they need grace.

In A Good Man is Hard to Find that moment arrives when a notorious
convict points his gun at a grandma. Though she’s spent the majority of the
story picking at others while basking in her own goodness, she has a moment of
clarity. She looks at the criminal and is reminded of her own son. She realizes
that the two men aren’t so different. She stops talking. Her fancy hat falls to
the ground. And she sees that sheisn’t
so different from the murderer, either. Her epiphany ends abruptly, with three
bullets to the chest:

“She would have been a good woman,” the
Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her
life.”

With this morbid line,
O’Connor reminds her audience that grace is a wake-up call. It carries a
dramatic message: You are not ok. You never will be. You need something outside
of yourself.

Grace is for the guilty

When I think about the
grandmother’s epiphany, I think about a song by indie artist, Sufjan Stevens. It’s
about John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer known for dressing up as a clown and murdering
over thirty teenage boys in the 1970s. The last lines of the song are striking:

And in my best behavior/I am really
just like him.

This is the realization
we must come to. Before we can accept grace, we must admit that we are filthy,
rotten sinners who need grace. It’s what the Pharisees of Jesus’ day couldn’t
understand. In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable aimed directly at their stubborn
hearts: He told this parable to some who
trusted in themselves that they were righteous (v. 9).

You know the story. Two
men enter a temple to worship. The Pharisee stands tall and proud saying: God, I thank you that I am not like other
men while the other man can
hardly lift his face (v. 11). Instead, he stays low to the ground and cries
out: God, be merciful to me, a sinner! (v.
13)

Until we see ourselves
as sinners, we won’t recognize Christ as Savior (Luke 5:31). I remember
interviewing a prostitute in Los Angeles years ago. She said that one night she
saw a man murdered. Somebody threw him out a window. Everyone knew who did it,
but no one told. I asked her why not and she said that the murdered man had
molested a child. Anyone who would do
something like that deserves to die, she said.

She’s right. Anyone who
would do that deserves to die. But it’s more than that. Anyone who sins against
God in any way deserves death. James 2:10 puts me in the same camp as
pedophiles and serial killers: For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one
point has become accountable for all of it.

I
have failed. I’m accountable for all of it. I needgrace.

Grace is offensive

In another O’Connor
story, The Lame Shall Enter First, a
confident atheist, Shepherd, realizes that his good deeds have missed the mark.
After the loss of his wife, he reaches
out to a bitter, delinquent, teenage boy with a clubfoot. Rufus wants nothing
to do with him, but Shepherd insists. He takes him into his home, buys him a
new boot, and tells him how much potential he has. He spends all his time
playing savior to someone who doesn’t want his help. All the while, his son grieves
alone. By the time Shepherd realizes his mistake, it’s too late. His son is
gone.

Throughout this story,
grace continually offends. It offends Shepherd’s pride and superior intellect. That book is something for you to hide
behind, he says when he sees Rufus reading the Bible. It’s for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and
figure things out for themselves.

He assures Rufus: You
don’t believe it. You’re too intelligent. But Rufus angrily replies: You
don’t know nothing about me. Even if I didn’t believe it, it would still be
true. Grace is what we need, whether we accept it or not. And though
Shepherd dismisses the gospel at every turn, he
is given insight into the depths of his own failure. He failed to save Rufus.
He failed his own son. He is the one in need of a shepherd.

Grace is offensive
because it points to the deficiency in each of us.

Grace is costly

Even more offensive
than our need for grace is how much it costs.

Too often I forget that
because God is just, my sins couldn’t just disappear. They had to be punished.
And Jesus walked toward that punishment. He walked toward the hill where pain
was a promise.

His death wasn’t merely
symbolic. When we read about the countless slaughtered animals in the Old
Testament, we must make the connection: Jesus’ body was the ultimate bloody
sacrifice. It was real nails ripping through skin and muscle. His emotional
agony was so intense that, before his death, he asked God if there was any
other way (Mat. 26:39).

None of us could die as
Jesus died. Sinless. The perfect substitute. His death was gory because that is
what our sins deserve.

Grace is God’s desire

The Pharisees wanted to
know why Jesus spent so much time with unworthy people.

Jesus told them. It was
because they were sick and needed a doctor. He saw the Pharisees’ disease as
well. He knew that it ran deep but that they were unwilling to cry out for
help. Witnessing people reject the medicine of grace grieved Jesus:

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the
prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your
children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were
not willing (Luke 13:34).

And when he drew near and saw the city,
he wept over it (Luke
19:41).

Grace is costly. It is
necessary. And God desires that we admit our problem and embrace His solution.

Flannery O’Connor may
have written violent stories about strange characters from the South, but she
understood grace. She knew that no man is righteous until he is clothed in
Christ. This requires that we see our nakedness and recognize our need. For the Son of Man came to seek
and to save the lost (Luke 19:10).

’Twas
grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

--John Newton

As for
me, I am poor and needy,but
the Lord takes thought for me.You are my help and my deliverer;do
not delay, O my God!

1 comment:

This is an excellent piece. Anyone who reads or teaches Flannery O 'Conner needs to add this to their curriculum. I think you interpreted her exactly the way she intended us to. I'm glad you got to the root of what she was trying to express. Now other people will be able to get so much more out of it.

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The Authors

About the Authors

Rachel Watson (top image) is a theology student at The University of St. Andrews, a writer and a high school English teacher whose goal in the classroom is to show her students how to think, build discernment, and enjoy great literature.She has written for RELEVANT, The Gospel Coalition and The Englewood Review. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Miriam Boone (bottom image) has spent the past six years working as the Program Coordinator for One Hope where she's helped develop and direct an after school and summer tutoring program, an urban ministry internship for college students and more. Miriam holds a BA in English and Bible from The Master's College. She also spent a semester studying at the University of Oxford and completed the Christian Counseling Education Foundation's Advanced Biblical Counseling program. Miriam loves celebrating Christmas, reading children's literature, coaching basketball, and trying to help the hurting make sense of God's severe mercies in our lives. She and her husband Nate completed two adoptions from Uganda and now have their first children, a precious son and a beautiful daughter.